Investing in Our People
Penn State is a world-class university because of our people. University leaders are devoting significant resources to continue attracting and retaining the talented individuals who make Penn State great.
At Penn State, our faculty and staff are at the core of our success. We are committed to providing an exceptional experience for our employees, including competitive pay and excellent benefits; engaging, impactful and meaningful work; flexible work arrangements; and opportunities for professional growth and advancement — all to bolster our critical, collective work in support of our students and the University’s core academic mission.
To continue to attract and retain top talent, Penn State has made significant investments to keep staff salaries aligned with industry and role-based benchmarks. The University invested more than $156 million in salary adjustments in total this past fiscal year and the current fiscal year, including 3% for annual salary increases in its budget for each fiscal year. This investment in our people allows Penn State to continue offering the highest quality education and delivering on research and innovation.
Building on the completion of the Compensation Modernization initiative, which updated classification and compensation structures for staff positions at Penn State, Penn State Human Resources has continued its employee recruitment and retention efforts by rolling out the new Career Progressions process and launching a new program in fall 2024 honoring employee milestones for their years of service to the University.
The University offers a competitive benefits package to its employees, and continues to invest in employee benefits. For its high-quality employee health care plans, Penn State pays for 75% of employee health care costs. Other perks of working at the University include substantial paid vacation and sick leave, retirement contributions, and tuition discounts for employees and their families.
The University is also working to attract and retain faculty in a number of ways, including — but not limited to — targeted seed grants, competitive retention packages, equipment investments, and faculty recognition through chairs, faculty startups and other means. Penn State announced more than $10 million in support for faculty promotions across the FY2024-25 and 2025-26 budgets and additional support for new professional development programming for faculty. The University also awarded 51 grants to teaching and clinical non-tenure-line faculty for spring 2025 as part of its new Opportunity Grant Professional Development Program.
Penn State strives to offer a positive work culture that includes fostering a diverse workforce. The University has made diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) a cornerstone of its hiring and retention practices. In addition, Penn State has encouraged the creation of employee resource groups — voluntary, employee-created and led groups of individuals who share common identities, backgrounds or interests.
Through these major investments and ongoing efforts, Penn State seeks to maintain its reputation as a highly sought after organization for academic and professional job candidates.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is Penn State investing in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB)?
The University is continuing to make meaningful investments in areas that will bring greater equity for students, faculty and staff of all identities. Penn State has launched efforts to further support LGBTQ+ and military-connected community members, including two new employee resource groups in fall 2023 and hired a gender diverse care role in Student Affairs. The University established agile service teams focused on four priorities Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi announced to advance her DEIB goals. Penn State has also invested in the Office of Student Disability Resources to increase the number of staff and is renovating and relocating both the testing center and office where students seek support. To support staff diversity, Human Resources launched a new DEIB resource page with information on inclusive hiring practices; partnered with Diversejobs.net to automatically post all Penn State job postings to the site (without cost to units); is working on comprehensive inclusive hiring training for those serving on search committees, hiring managers and HR staff; and implemented the ability for employees to share their pronouns and name pronunciations in Workday. HR and the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access are collaborating to implement a new standardized process to provide affirmative action plan data to units during job searchers. To support faculty diversity, the University has established new procedures for all academic units to create faculty recruitment plans for tenure-line searches that address how units develop diverse candidate pools and evaluate candidates. The University’s decision-making must align with how Penn State can make measurable progress in four priority areas shared by President Bendapudi: to close gaps in graduation rate outcomes across identity groups; increase faculty diversity; expand access to staff professional development; and improve a sense of belonging for all Penn Staters.
The Compensation Modernization initiative created a new market-based pay structure for staff. What is Penn State doing to retain top-performing faculty?
There are many ways Penn State works to retain its faculty, including targeted seed grants, competitive retention packages, investment in state-of-the-art equipment, building interdisciplinary teams of faculty in areas of strategic impact, and faculty recognition through chairs, faculty startups and other means. The University also awarded 51 grants to teaching and clinical non-tenure-line faculty for spring 2025 as part of its new Opportunity Grant Professional Development Program.
What is the University doing to address pay equity between long-time staff members and new hires?
Penn State has designed and implemented revised guidelines to offer more flexibility for unit leaders to adjust salaries within particular pay grades to more easily recognize and retain high-performing staff. The updated guidelines also make it easier for unit leaders to determine an appropriate starting salary for new hires with involvement of HR, removing a previous administrative hurdle (red tape) that led to slower hires. The revised pay grades used data from 10 distinct salary surveys to align University salaries with industry benchmarks, and the updated pay grades are narrower than the previous salary bands, with the goal of limiting inequity across Penn State. Under these revised guidelines, high-performing staff may be able to grow in their role without moving to a new job through the new staff career progressions process, further reducing inequities across the institution.
How is the University aligning staff salaries with industry benchmarks, now and into the future?
For staff, the University has committed to undertaking constant reviews of its job profiles, with a goal of reviewing every profile within a two- to three-year period. In addition, Human Resources will undertake a review of the entire salary structure every three to five years. As announced last January, these historic investments in staff salaries marked the conclusion of the Compensation Modernization initiative, but the resulting salary adjustments are a significant step in moving forward with Penn State’s goal of maintaining its position as an employer of choice in a rapidly changing job market.
Why don’t annual salary increases keep up with inflation?
Penn State values its employees and recognizes the impact of inflation on our workforce, so the University invested more than $156 million in salary adjustments in total during the current and previous fiscal years, even as the University itself was encountering inflation and stagnant state funding. As university leaders noted, budgeting for an annual salary increase of 3% has a nearly $50 million impact on the University’s annual budget. This will continue to be a commitment to address. Penn State’s leadership works hard to provide employees with the largest salary increases that resources will allow while also meeting its commitment to Pennsylvania students and their families to keep tuition costs as low as possible. The University is working toward a funding model in which salary increases do not rely so heavily on tuition, but rather on other income sources.